It’d be a lie to put some words to paper,
to say I have a way to express
anything that’s in my head and worth
expressing. I haven’t- the bits of truth
exist, and they are butterfly beautiful,
beyond my clumsy tries to pin them to the page.

I want to call and tell you
that I drank a glass of lemon water, with vitamin;
ate rotisserie chicken, watched television, and then ate some more chicken.
Pass along vague feelings-
of unease and boredom and my overwhelming need
to know just what you had for dinner today,
or how many times (exactly) you peed.

Call and share this strange fascination I’m developing
for the tiniest minutiae of our lives apart.

But I have this overwhelming fear
of voicemail, so it goes- and so
instead I watch some great kung-fu, and
masturbate (it’s not so great, at times it feels mechanical).

Living (in the moment) is for suckers,
now’s the time to let the seasons change.

He lifted his head up against the gusting snow, leaned against his shovel, flashed me a shit-eating grin, and said: I’m going to move to Maine and settle down somewhere along the coast, with a pretty girl who appreciates the simple things. We’ll have just enough money to pay the bills and warm the house against the cold. When winter comes we’ll live off canned soup and the mushrooms that will grow in the basement, and we’ll be happy under our layers of blankets and scattered piles of books. She’ll tell me all her dreams when she wakes up, and stand out in the cold looking at constellations, wearing nothing. I’ll wear nothing but flannel; I’ll make a living with just my sweat and these two hands, and goddamn will it feel good to be alive.

He read 70 pages of Richard Yates and made a neutral facial expression. He wanted to be like Eeyore. He wanted to be like Tao Lin, then he remembered that Tao Lin is kind of maybe a pedophile and definitely abusing uppers. That made him want to be like Tao Lin a little less, but did not make him feel especially glad to be himself. He decided that he liked being lonely. He wanted to be depressed, maybe.

He imagined it involved unwarranted feelings of negativity and ennui. Long walks during gray weather and distant looks that passers-by might find strangely alluring. His pocket vibrated a little. No, that was something he had imagined, but his phone was out so he checked the time and contemplated calling each of his ex-girlfriends to apologize.

Then he remembered that none of them had called him to apologize, that this was probably something that normal people didn’t do. Being depressed was kind of pathetic, actually. It was something embarrassing that you were a little proud of, maybe, but couldn’t share with anyone, like a gigantic piece of shit that just will not go down.